Motorola Lapdock 100 hands-on

With a new batch of quality Android powered smartphones, Motorola has yet another new laptop accessory ready to provide handset owners the usefulness of the Webtop experience – Motorola’s home brewed app that provides the full fidelity of a desktop web browser.

Just like the previous model that launched with the Motorola ATRIX 4G earlier in the year, the Motorola Lapdock 100 is the latest 10.1” model that accommodates the recent crop of Android powered Motorola smartphones – like the ATRIX 2, PHOTON 4G, DROID BIONIC, and DROID RAZR. Going forward, it will also be compatible with most devices being released in the future, which didn’t make the original model all that useful since it was compatible with the ATRIX only. Packing a weight of 2.2lbs, it’s fairly lightweight enough to handle, thanks to its all-plastic construction. For something that’s comprised out of plastic, the Lapdock 100 feels sturdy enough to withstand the elements – plus, it packs 2 full sized USB ports, left & right speakers, connection adapter, and a lock port.

With its 1366 x 768 resolution, it’s good enough to make out most things – though, fine text can still be indistinct with its 10.1” size. Unfortunately, the keyboard layout is indeed cramped, which is evident by some of the half sized buttons we find with it. However, after some playing around, we’re able to speed type at a decent pace with minimal mistakes. And as our palms rest on its keyboard, the Lapdock’s trackpad sits firmly right in the middle – thus, giving us good navigational control. All in all, the build quality and size of the Lapdock 100 is nice and is easily on par to the design of some netbooks out there.

Connecting a Webtop enabled smartphone (the Motorola DROID RAZR in our case), we’re instantly transported to the main Webtop screen that displays the handset’s interface on the left side. Of course, it’s nice being able to control all of the functions of the phone on the Lapdock 100, and at the same time, we get the full fidelity of using Mozilla’s FireFox web browser. Naturally, it gives us a good blend of multitasking between various apps, but in most cases, we find its performance to be extremely sluggish – even worse, we’re greeted with warning messages to close down apps because of low memory.

After looking at its full outright price of $249.99, some of you might want to reconsider picking it up – especially when decent netbooks can be purchased at roughly the same cost. Unless you dearly want to experience Webtop, it’s blatantly obvious that the Lapdock 100 makes for a great add-on accessory for your brand new Android powered Motorola smartphone. Actually, it’s not a must-have item, but rather, an optional luxury for those who are willing to fork over some cash to get more out of their device.

7 Comments

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I know several customers who come in looking for netbooks could benefit from this if they have one of these phones. Instead of having two lines with two plans, you'd just hook up this dock and - voila - netbook!. For the most part anyways. Or just the spoiled kid who wants a laptop and nice phone and the parents don't want to pay for two plans each month :P

I\'m very glad that Motorola hasn\'t abandoned the concept, as it\'s truly innovative-plug and play processors along with an infinitely upgradeable computer. The execution will probably get better with each iteration too.

I love the concept. The original laptop dock for the Atrix had poor reviews. I think the initial execution was not up to par. Also, smartphones then weren't powerful enough.

I'm not sure if smartphones are powerful enough yet. I do hope that Motorola continues this concept. I think it may be a couple of years before this concept works adequately enough to perhaps be an alternative to tablets at least. I love the mobility of my phone. My tablet provides a more powerful device with a larger screen and longer battery life. If a phone plus dock concept works well in the future, I may consider that instead of a tablet in the future.

Nope, the lapdock is a loser all around. Took Motorola three weeks and many, many, many phone calls to finally ship me one. It worked for 48 hours and now won't load the webtop. Three attempts with tech support to fix and they have no idea why not. Okay, then take it back. But their system doesn't recognize the serial number, so they can't process the repair order. And here I sit with a useless piece of electronics and no way to get it fixed. Motorola customer service is so completely inept that I would never recommend trying to deal with them. You have been warned.

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